Our Schools in War Time—and After

by Arthur D. Dean

It also outlined a scheme for taking a census of mechanics and technicians for the state of Minnesota, which is now being carried out, and on the basis of which recruiting will go forward for every branch of the government service.

It made arrangements for bringing to Minneapolis, on the first of August, 425 recruits from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station at Chicago, and distributed them among the following classes in training at the institute: general electricians, radio electricians, carpenter's mates, machine-shop operators, gas-engine operators, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, cooks, and bakers.

The institute is training more than 200 novices in day and evening classes in telegraphy. Of these about 60 per cent are girls and women, this course being offered in response to a direct request from railroad and telegraph lines in the vicinity of Minneapolis. It is also giving some instruction in operating-foremanship work for a prominent local steel and machinery company, as this company has renewed the manufacture of munitions and needs operation foremen. The institute was called upon to select the most promising men and to train them in one process of which they are later to have charge in the shop. Director Charles A. Prosser in making a report to the secretary of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education said:

We have 154 people taking radio work in day and evening classes. This group is made up of a number of different types. First, there are the amateurs with licenses who have enlisted in our first radio company of the United States Signal Service and have gone into that class to improve their speed. Second, there are other young men who have gone in to learn the work so as to be recruited into another radio company of the United States Signal Corps or into the naval service, and there are, in the third place, young men who have gone in with the idea of offering their services to the Marconi Company, either for land work or for duty on board the merchant ships which are being built.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 mechanics and technicians have been sent into different branches of the government service by Dunwoody Institute. This number is made up in part of our own students from our school—particularly from the evening classes, although some of our day boys have gone—and in part of mechanics and technicians throughout Minnesota who have gone into the service through Dunwoody Institute, where we conduct a recruiting station and where we are recruiting into the service every Wednesday, applications being taken in the interim.

We have sent into the service 1 motor-truck company; 2 others are in process of organization. We are sending out 1 radio company, which is ready to go, and are about to organize another. We are also organizing 1 wire company, 1 baking company, and 1 company of cooks. In addition we have sent men to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and are sending men to the Puget Sound Navy Yard. We have also put men in touch with the Civil Service Commission and sent them into the service in this way.

The response of these and other colleges and technical institutes justifies as nothing else could their past claims that they train not only for the spirit of service but for the life of service.

The effect of the war on the college curriculum cannot be hastily measured. Institutions of collegiate grade are slow to make radical changes in the requirements for the bachelor's degree. Some have already shortened the college course to three years. Others have decided as a war measure that students ought to be through college by the time they reach conscription age. Some are offering opportunity for all-the-year-round work. Others are allowing war service to count toward a college degree. The English universities are already thinking of strengthening their courses in science and laboratory research, of giving more attention to modern languages, and of developing vocational courses.

Certainly in America there will be an immediate and greater demand for so-called "practical" subjects. It may be that one of the effects of the war will be the sharpening of the differentiation and an increase of competition between the idealistic and the practical groups of studies. This will be unfortunate. There should be no sharpening of differences of opinion. They had much better be dulled. There is no real necessity for antagonism between the cultural and the vocational subjects. People only think there is a need for constant justification of the one against the other. Such thinking has become a habit of mind.

The French have a way of saying that the cultural subjects are merely the moral conditions, the ethical history, and a judgment as to the ethical value of the world complex of vocational and economic life; for this reason any conflict between cultural and vocational subjects is impossible, and the more vocational education is developed, the more will the cultural aspects be needed and the more highly developed will they become. The French point out that what we term cultural subjects developed in two civilizations which were very highly practical, vocational, and militaristic; namely, Greece and Rome. They speak of the humanities as being essentially the abiding lessons of those civilizations which in vocational and military efficiency stood much higher above their fellows than Germany stands in those respects above contemporary civilization to-day.

Vocational subjects are direct-service subjects always. By their very nature they respond immediately to an emergency. The cultural subjects are more indirect in their effect. They could not be otherwise. I often wish we could get into the habit of speaking of liberal subjects in the sense in which this term was used in the older days of our colleges, when the term "liberal" implied that the subjects classed under this head were liberalizing; that is, they liberated, or set free, the minds, spirits, and bodies of men and women from prejudice, selfishness, tradition, passion, cruelty, and so on. I have never seen how one could elect culture, for it is always a by-product coming out of thinking and living. To study the language of an ancient people and to learn nothing of their government or ideals is useless. To study this government and these ideals of an older civilization and to see no lessons for the world of to-day is almost valueless. To study the past in terms of problems of human society is liberalizing.

New meanings of the realities of war are before us. New concepts of two great ideals of government confront us. New methods of making war more horrible strike our eyes with every news issue. New schemes for patching up human life that it may go forth again to battle or return to industrial warfares of peace are heralded every week. New societies for the relief of human suffering due to the war are chartered constantly. New alignments of political groups committed to reform are in the making. New groupings of nations not formerly allied stand before our eyes. New methods of combining activities of great corporate interests for government needs are published daily. New trade possibilities now latent are prophesied as being inevitable. New ideals and new ideas gathered in the trenches are appearing over battle lines for new governmental practices. New advances in the field of government control of prices startle us continually.